


Same Blood

by exposeyou



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-04
Updated: 2011-06-04
Packaged: 2017-10-20 03:29:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/208284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exposeyou/pseuds/exposeyou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spike tells Buffy about the time he encountered an ensouled Angel in St Petersburg.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Same Blood

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Tabitha666 for the Whedon Plot Bunnies Prompt Fest on Livejournal.
> 
> The prompt was:
> 
> Fandom: Btvs/Ats  
> Character(s): Buffy, Spike, Angel. Spike/Buffy.  
> Prompt: Buffy finds out about "that one time" between Spike and Angel during s6 of Btvs/s3 of Ats.

Most humans don't give much thought to the minds of vampires. Why should they, when we mostly act like animals? But I always had a vivid imagination. As a boy, the schoolmaster used to scold me for daydreaming.

Dreaming. They think we don't do it, just like they think we can't love. But we can, and do, do both of these things.

My Dru, she was a dreamer too. Always hearing things, seeing the stars burning through the ceiling. She felt things keenly. We matched well like that.

Angelus, now he wasn't so much one for emotions, but he was a dreamer too. In a way. He couldn't live in the moment, even then. But he had his own kind of dreams and visions. He saw the 'big picture’; he made plans for carnage and cruelty on a grand scale.

The differences in our nature led to clashes, of course. Our little foursome was less of a pack of wolves than it was a pride with too many lions. Two strong-headed men like us, we were bound to fight. I'll admit, I got a kick out of it, but it wasn't as if he didn't push my buttons too.

Four vampires, with personalities as strong as ours....it was a bad idea. We were each too big, too bold, too full of grand ideas. We couldn't stay in one place too long, for we always drew attention to ourselves with some grand spectacle of violence. We blazed a bloody trail through most of Europe, we did.

In the end, it had to happen. We shattered, like fragments of a mirror, and went our separate ways. Drusilla and I wouldn't be parted of course, but you know the damnedest thing? We could be anywhere in the world, turn a corner, and there one of them would be. Darla in an orphanage in the London Blitz, her mouth smeared red. The pair of them in an alley in 1870s Paris. And Angel in St Petersburg in 1904.

Dru and I had stayed in the Orient for a while after the Boxer Rebellion. We fell in love with the East when I killed that slayer. After we got bored of China, we went to Japan for a bit, and heard about the war brewing with Russia. Dru got excited, or course, at the thought of a proper war, but I felt the urge to get back to Europe. Or near to it, anyway. So we took off to St Petersburg to see this war from the other side.

God, it was beautiful. Filth on one side of the street, gold on the other. Palaces that looked ablaze, they were filled with so many lights. Aristocratic indulgence worse than anything in France before the revolution. And they still had serfs! We could dance with princes in the evening, then tear the throats out of ten peasants before the sun came up, leave the bodies in the street, and no-one even cared!

Dru adored it, even more than China. She liked to run barefoot through the snow. I dressed her in furs and jewels, and she kissed the Tsarina's hand. We made quite an impression on the nobility there, and almost by accident.

I was out for a walk one night, in one of the middling neighbourhoods. Most of the city was either a slum or a palace, but there were a few areas where intellectuals and merchants lived, where you could feed on someone well-fed without having to worry too much about guards.

Anyway, I'm out for a walk and a bite to eat, did the usual: kick in a door, slaughter a family. It was amazing how brazen you could be there, sometimes. So I'm finishing them off when five soldiers charge into the house. I'm a bit wary of their guns, so I don't go for them straight away, and they start _thanking_ me! Turns out he was a dissident, some sort of communist, and they were there on execution orders. Even invited me for a drink to thank me for doing their job for them!

That's how I ended up in an alehouse drinking vodka with the head of the Russian secret police, and got recruited into the Okhrana. He was a good sort, apart from the murdering, and understood that I would work on a bit of a freelance basis, alone, at night. Go in, kill who they wanted, get out. It was an odd deal, but then they're a funny lot in Russia, very superstitious.

That was how me and Dru got introduced to the royal family, a little thank you for my hard work. She loved it, talked about the sparkle of the chandeliers and the weak beating of that little boy's heart for years. She said she wanted to make him better, give him her strong blood.

Anyway, where was I? Yeah, so, lovely churches in Russia. Very ornate, lots of gold, and these funny crosses that don't give me as much trouble as regular ones. I have no idea why.

So I'm sent to kill this priest who'd done something or other that the Tsar didn't like, and I'm in this lovely church, waiting for him, when who should walk past but Angelus!

He might not have recognized me, in a fur-lined coat and my hair cut short, but I knew him in an instant. He was filthy, wearing rags, but he was Angel. I'd know my sire anywhere.

We spoke in English, and I called him my brother.

"You'll never pass for human, wearing rags like that in weather like this."

He took me in. "You like you're doing well at passing for human."

"Very well. I'm working for the Tsar. Can you give me a minute? I just need to kill the priest here."

He held my arm as I turned away. "No need to, William. What did you think I was doing back there?"

"It's Spike now."

"Of course."

We walked outside. I asked him back to the house, where he could have a bath, get some clean clothes, but he didn't want to.

"I don't want to see Dru. You know how she gets. Is she still angry at me for leaving?"

Of course, I didn't want him to have the satisfaction of knowing that my girl still pined for him, but she did.

"Anyway, it was you I came here to see."

Now that surprised me. I looked up to him; I really did, despite our differences. He was like the father I never had. A brutal, cruel father, but a father nonetheless. And when he left us in China, it was up to me to be a man. To assume responsibilities, to take care of the women, to take on his mantle.

The thought that he might have any attachment to me, however, was not an idea I had entertained. He may have been like my father, but I was less like a son to him than a dog. A dog that you might praise for good hunting, or kick if it misbehaved, but not something that you loved or respected.

"I feel so alone."

He wasn't big on talking, my sire. Oh, he could do marvelous things with words, better than me, big, grandiose speeches that drew pictures in the air, but though he could talk beautifully, he never really _said_ anything.

I could still tell you his thoughts on politics, religion, and not having servants, but the man himself? Angelus never talked about feelings unless it was how angry he was with me for inciting a riot.

By now we were outside, in the graveyard, and he turned away from me as he carried on speaking.

"I had to leave; I couldn't be around you anymore. Any of you, I mean. But living out among humans by myself...I can't do that either. I can't be one of them. I can't live like a lamb when really I'm a wolf."

Now, I'm generally quite in touch with my feelings. I was a modern man long before modern man was invented, but at this moment I'm thinking, Angelus, what are you blathering on about? And he kept going.

"I...I found Darla, in France, I tried to tell her all this. She called me pathetic! Told me to get away from her, said that I was disgusting! I loved her for a hundred years, and she wouldn't help me!"

He turned back, fumbling with the buttons on his threadbare shirt. Bared in the cold air, his chest was a mess of scar tissue. Shiny and pink, some parts of it blistered and crusted.

"She threw an oil-lamp at me, William. She wanted me to burn."

I didn't even care about him getting my name wrong, then. Here was my sire, the Scourge of Europe, weeping under a streetlamp and looking like a piece of cooked meat.

He was right; Dru wouldn't be able to handle it, whatever was going on. I wanted to, though. I wanted to be a man, to look after him, to find out what was wrong and to make it right, even if it meant killing Darla. They say we can't dream, and they say we can't love. Well there was never a love more fierce and pure than what I felt for my sire that night. When you saw your mother sick and dying, and even though you're the slayer, there was nothing you could do about it? That was kind of how I felt then. Like the rules of my life had changed, and I didn't know what role I was supposed to be playing any more. But I wanted him to stop crying, to heal, and to be Angelus again.

"I just want to feel close to something again."

Even though he is taller than me, I took him in my arms and held him. He worked his way inside my greatcoat as if he was desperate for the warmth that he couldn't feel.

I asked him where he'd been living, and he took me to a cottage behind the church. I think, now, that the priest had given him shelter there. It was Spartan, just a bed, a table, and a stove, really. Not like the place me and Dru were staying. I got a cloth and bathed his chest, cleaned some of the scabs off of it. They bled a little, and I licked it gently, and then... He looked so grateful, not to be alone any more, to be with someone who knew what he was. And then he kissed me.

That night...Well, like I say, Angel was never much one for talking about his feelings, and I'm more of a man of action myself, so... We showed each other that we understood each other, that monsters _can_ love, without words.

He trembled, and I touched him until it wasn't out of fear but from loss of control. And when he fell asleep, and screamed in his dreams, I held him.

The next evening, when I woke up, he was gone. Dru could smell him on me when I got home. She knew exactly what had happened, and that her daddy wasn't right. She wept and wailed for days. He was right that they shouldn't see each other. If I'd known what was wrong with him at the time, I would have spurned him like Darla did.

So, when I came to Sunnydale, seeing him here with you... Seeing him was always strange, but knowing that he'd got his soul back, understanding why he acted the way he did that night... It affected me. And of course, when he lost it again, the rules changed again too. It was a lot to get used to. When we teamed up, me and you, it was because I'd already lost him, I couldn't lose Dru too.

+++

"Buffy? Say something?"

"I've just found out that two of the men in my life slept together decades before I was even born. Forgive me if I don't know what to say!"

"You can't just keep running away from everything that you don't like, Buffy! You run away from the Scoobies, you try to run away from the fact that you're the slayer, now you're running away from the fact that I don't think or feel the way that humans do. Well neither did Angel. If you're going to keep getting involved with vampires, which God knows seems to be a bit of a pattern with you, you're gonna have to accept that we're different. What Angel and I did was unusual, but it wasn't wrong, and it doesn't change anything. Why is it any different from Tara and Willow?"

"Because...they're my friends and I-"

"It's different because you _want_ it to be different. It isn't because we had sex-"

"I don't want to hear about it anymore!"

"Let me finish. You don't want to hear anything that stops Angel from seeming like this perfect picture that you have, and you don't want to accept that I can feel any sort of compassion or love. You don't want your perfect little boxes of 'good' and 'evil' and 'normal' and 'wrong' blurred."

 

 

 

You just looked at me before you stormed out. I should've known you wouldn't understand.


End file.
